Advance Fee Scam stalks Sullivan County
Photo by: Tom.Arthur
The Sullivan County Sheriff’s office is advising all senior residents to watch out for an advance fee scam especially aimed at them by con artists from Canada. Several senior residents have reported receiving near perfect fake checks in their ordinary mails along with instructions to cash them and send back a percentage of the money through wire transfer.
This is a scam because weeks after depositing the check, the bank would turn around and say that the checks are fraudulent. By this time, though, the scammers would have vanished with the wired money.
By giving a return address in US, the fraudsters would like to have people believe they are operating from there. Canadian postage stamps and postmarks, however, give them away. In fact, the scammers may well be operating from Quebec as a phone number mentioned in the letter is prefixed with the Quebec area code, 514-.
County Sheriff Michael Schiff offered a simple rule for residents to stay away from the scam:
If they want you to deposit the check and then send money via Western Union or Money Gram, that is the red flag, it is a scam, period!
Source: MidHudsonNews.com
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